The process of forming steel strip into desired structural shapes such as rectangular hollow section, circular tube, angles, channels and other open profile sections is well known and has been in use for many years. The feed material is normally so-called "black" steel which has typically been formed into steel strip by a hot rolling process in a manufacturing mill.
In the past one normally recognised method of obtaining increased yield strength of the finished product formed from a subsequent cold rolling process, is to alter the "chemistry" of the steel strip, i.e. by adding various alloying metals into the composition of the steel before hot rolling. Another method is the use of thermomechanical practice during hot rolling. These are expensive processes due to the cost of the metal alloy and the process for obtaining the desired mix of alloy, the technological cost of processing by thermomechanical practices, and also because of the necessity to keep inventory of different types of metal section in order to meet the demand for different performance characteristics at an economical price.
For these reasons, the vast majority of all cold rolled steel sections are formed from common black steel with the size and weight of the section simply being increased where desired to obtain the necessary load-bearing characteristics.
There are however many applications where it is desirable from both engineering and economic points of view to enhance the yield characteristics of the steel from which a structural section is formed in order to give increased performance compared with a similar section rolled from black steel in the conventional manner.